You probably already know about the NotifyOSD packages patched by Leolik (Sukochev Roman) which allow you to customize the notification bubles (colors, font and so on). Well, the patched NotifyOSD PPA got an update seconds ago which adds further customizations (to which Mark Shuttleworth is completely against) such as: display the notifications in different corners of the screen and also finally fixes the timeout option which was broken since... forever in Ubuntu.